Print Is Dead. Long Live Print.

As magazine publishers have shifted heavily toward digital in order to survive, one publication has chosen to remain faithful to paper.This week I’m chatting to my friend (and former editor) Kira Don, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Stranger’s Guide, a magazine about “place” that I (probably inarticulately) describe to people as “somewhere at the intersection of current affairs and travel.” I worked as a senior editor at the magazine for several years. I love it. It’s a beautifully produced publication (it does have a website too) with photo essays, quirky stories, and features that run thousands of words long. When I launched Deadliners back on April 9, I promised I’d bring you exclusive interviews with the people thinking about the future of journalism: reporters who are refusing to quit, founders starting new platforms, and storytellers finding exciting ways to tell us what’s going on in the world. What Kira is doing is precisely what I was talking about.Deadliners is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Kira has worked as a magazine editor in New York and California, was executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and as a journalist she’s covered politics and culture around the world. She also co-founded the Oakland Book Festival in the city she now calls home.Since it launched eight years ago, Stranger’s Guide has been nominated for no less than 14 national magazine awards and it’s won four — not bad for a publication that launched on a shoestring at a time when we’re being told that print is all-but dead. “I love print the way some people love vinyl,” Kira told me. “There’s something about holding an object in your hand, and so in starting this magazine, the most important thing was to make it an object that you would want to keep. It’s not print for print’s sake.”What makes Stranger’s Guide feel so important right now is that Kira is doing something AI will never be able to do: traveling to a country, sitting down with local writers and photographers over lunch, and uncovering the accidental, beautiful daily realities of life that then make it into print. “We’re journalists in a moment in which journalism has so little respect; when it has so few avenues for being read or acknowledged or noticed,” she said.We cover a lot of ground — how Kira builds a bespoke editorial board from scratch for every single issue, why she turned Stranger's Guide into a nonprofit, the Iran stories she's most proud of, and her simple advice for anyone crazy enough to start a print magazine in 2026. ("Just do it," she says. And she means it.) Hit play to listen to our conversation above. Or find Deadliners on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Get full access to Deadliners at deadliners.substack.com/subscribe